Moore’s Law, the origin of life, and dropping turkeys off a building.

by T. Ryan Gregory, on May 7th, 2013

I’ve already mentioned the nonsensical paper “published” in (surprise, surprise) arXiv in which the authors claim that the origin of life occurred long before the origin of the Earth based on the application of Moore’s Law to DNA. I won’t go into all the reasons that this is silly — for that, you can see critiques by PZ Myers and Massimo Pigliucci. Suffice it to say that the data, the analysis, and the interpretation are all problematic.

Notably, the authors present this figure, which more or less sums up what is wrong with the entire paper.

As I saw this, I couldn’t help but feel like it reminded me of some other extrapolation I had seen years ago. And today it came to me — cooking a turkey by dropping it off a roof! Or rather, by converting potential energy into kinetic energy. Here’s the figure from the very funny article, which was published in the Journal of Irreproducible Results.

14 comments to Moore’s Law, the origin of life, and dropping turkeys off a building.

I think it is relevant to point out that many ideas, including the figure, in the recent arXiv paper “Life before Earth” by Alexei A. Sharov and Richard Gordon, have been presented before in a paper entitled “Genome increase as a clock for the origin and evolution of life” published by Sharov in Biology Direct, 2006. The paper was peer reviewed (surprise, surprise) by some of the leading experts in the origin and evolution of life: Eugene Koonin, Chris Adami and Arcady Mushegian. The paper as well as the peer reviews are available for free at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1745-6150-1-17.pdf

While the graph in Figure 1 can be immediately seen as absurd, it does make one wonder what the real graph would look like and can one do any statistically significant extrapolation to find the temporal origin of life?
Speculations, Dr. Gregory?

I think it is relevant to point out that many ideas, including the figure, in the recent arXiv paper “Life before Earth” by Alexei A. Sharov and Richard Gordon, have been presented before in a paper entitled “Genome increase as a clock for the origin and evolution of life” published by Sharov in Biology Direct, 2006. The paper was peer reviewed (surprise, surprise) by some of the leading experts in the origin and evolution of life: Eugene Koonin, Chris Adami and Arcady Mushegian. The paper as well as the peer reviews are available for free at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1745-6150-1-17.pdf

I think it is relevant to point out that in most other journals, comment like those below would most likely lead to a rejection of a paper.
Eugene V. Koonin,
“I am not at all a priori prejudiced against the panspermia
hypothesis and actually agree with the author’s conclud-
ing sentence in that panspermia should be considered “on
equal basis with alternative hypotheses of de-novo life
origin on earth”. However, I think that the approach used
in this work provides no support for an early date of life’s
origin.”

Chris Adami,
“This paper is an example of how not to analyze data.”

Arcady Mushegian,
“Having said that, I do not see any striking arguments for
panspermy in this work.”

Jim,
Great compilation of key comments on Sharov’s paper. This case illustrates that a paper should not be judged on where it was published, whether it was peer-reviewed or not, or based on who wrote it. A paper, or an idea, should be judged simply based on its merit.

@Claudiu Bandea
Then why did you bother to say, “The paper was peer reviewed (surprise, surprise) by some of the leading experts in the origin and evolution of life: Eugene Koonin, Chris Adami and Arcady Mushegian”?
These seemed like a rather blatant appeal to authority. , and yet, these leading experts did no seem too convinced by it (especially Adami).

Then your first sentence was enough. As I pointed out before, the second sentence is an appeal to authority, which is made worse by the highly critical reviews. You imply that the reviewers endorse the work by your sentence. They clearly did not.

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If Sharov would have estimated the origin of life 9.7 ± 5 billion years ago, instead of 9.7 ± 2.5 billion years ago, then nobody would have cared. There are far too few points on that graph to make any estimates. One can argue that evolution of anything smaller than bacteria might have followed a different path, because it happened in a much larger space, and was not restricted to Earth.